Rather than
immersing us in a recognisable scenario fleshed out by either a first- or third-person narrative voice, as in most realist novels, Enrique Vila-Matas immediately plays so many tricks with his readers’ expectations that we begin to wonder if this is a novel at all. For much of the book, the narrative is more like a personal memoir or autobiographical account in the way it evokes the author’s formative years living in Paris in the 1970s, yet his experiences are disclosed in such a tongue-in-cheek, non-linear manner - often highly implausible in the way they casually record encounters with cultural celebrities (Margarita Duras, Isabelle Adjani, Roland Barthes) - that it is almost a surprise when you turn to Wikipedia and discover that the story of Vila-Matas’ time in Paris is apparently true, the hapless bumbler caught up in an absurdist comedy of his own making no more a fictional character than any of our remembered younger selves might seem.
To further blur the
division between fact and fiction, the novel frames the retrospective materials
in the form of a three-day lecture on the theme of irony which Vila-Matas is
delivering to a projected audience, again foregrounding his authorial presence
by making us imagine the memories articulated in his own wry, ambivalent voice.
The lecture in turn is prefigured by a comical opening scene in which the
novelist enters an Ernest Hemingway lookalike competition in Key West wearing a
false beard, only to be told he possesses “an absolute lack of physical
resemblance to Hemingway”.
It was Hemingway’s memoir of his early days in
Paris, A Moveable Feast, which first
inspired the young Vila-Matas to undergo his writerly apprenticeship in that
city, like so many other would-be artistic geniuses before him. In flagging up
his lack of resemblance to the more straight-talking realist Hemingway, whose
narrative romanticised the bohemian loucheness of 20’s Paris, Vila-Matas is
again inferring how unreliable and slippery his own story will be, and indeed
how unromantic; it will in fact debunk the nostalgic mythology of what living
in Paris is like by showing how “very poor and very unhappy” he was there.
As well as being a
parody of A Moveable Feast, Never Any End to Paris also plays with
the conventions of the bildungsroman,
the coming-of-age novel typically depicting a callow protagonist maturing
towards disabused understanding. Vila-Matas’ memoirs of Paris are a catalogue of
false starts and self-thwartings in his struggle to become a writer: he manages
to rent out a garret owned by Duras but cannot understand her “superior” French
when she gives him advice; he steals the idea for his first novel from
Nabokov’s Pale Fire; he
self-consciously poses as a Sartrean intellectual by adopting a black
polo-neck, glasses and a pipe, performing the role of ecrivain before he has any accomplished any writing.
Ultimately, Never Any End to Paris is an ironic anti-novel
about the novel: it begs reverberating questions about the form’s limitations
in being able to capture the protean reality of memory and identity but also
argues for its continuing pertinence (taking its cue from writers like Barthes,
Perec and Queneau who appear in its pages) as a post-modern game of ideas, a thought-provoking
and critical jeu d’esprit. Equally, it throws into doubt the role of the
novelist as an authentic, credible witness relating the true essence of
experiences he’s lived through and casts himself instead as a self-declaring
fabricator, a comic poseur who nevertheless manages to draw the reader in to
follow his often hilarious misadventures.
